Fetishism - Overview - Historical And Linguistic Origins, Comparative Religion, Philosophy, And Fetishism, Commodity Fetish, Psychoanalytic Interventions
economic questions relationship religious
Since the seventeenth century, thought about fetishism has been concerned with four overriding questions, all of them emerging in conflicts over representation that arose at the borders between cultural and historical worlds. These four questions concern the relationship between images and their referents in religious discourse; the attribution of causality and the nature of reason; the means for assessing and representing economic value; and desire and the relationship between consciousness and the material world. Although the term fetishism had its origins in comparative religious studies, it has become mainly associated with Marxian economic analysis on the one hand and psychoanalysis on the other.
Additional Topics
Most historical accounts trace the word fetish to the Portuguese term feitiço and its creoloziation as fetisso. Although a transliteration of the Portuguese term dominated discussion of the religious and economic practices of non-European peoples with whom merchants traded and against whom colonial powers waged wars of domination in the modern era, most of the Romance languages and English (b…
A full and comparatively oriented theory of fetishism, modeled on the concepts of animism, pantheism, and monotheism appeared a century later, when Charles de Brosses published Du culte des dieux fétiches (1760; On the worship of divine fetishes). On the basis of historical linguistics, de Brosses gave fetishism a meaning distinct from idolatry, with which fetish-worship had previously been c…
Comte was perhaps the only philosopher to advocate fetishism, but he was not the only one to identify its affective force. Nor was he alone in discovering an immanent and mimetic power in fetishism. Something of the latter is present in Marx's reading of the fetish character of the commodity, but in Marx's writing the fetish no longer grounds a strategic religion but is, rather, the …
Not incidentally, Sigmund Freud's (1856–1939) concept of the fetish also takes as its starting point the phenomenon of substitution. In his most direct address to the topic, the 1927 essay, "Fetishism," he argues that a fetish is a special form of penis substitute. For the boy who apprehends his mother's (and other women's) "lack" of a penis …
As a symptom, fetishism reveals not only the substitution through language (and its misrecognition) of one object for another, and of an object for a subject, but also the emergence of a new theory of language, one that presumes the arbitrary and unmotivated nature of the sign. However, as feminist scholars have observed, the phallus may be a signifer (or standard bearer), and even a signifer pret…
Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar. Reading "Capital." Translated by Ben Brewster. London: Verso, 1997. First French edition 1968. Bass, Alan. Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Baudrillard, Jean. Mirror of Production. Translated by Mark Poster. St. Louis, Mo.: Telos, 1975. Benjamin, Walter. "Paris, Capital …
Citing this material
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments